


we will never be here again

by theseourbodies



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: F/M, Implied Relationships, Many kinds of ghosts, Other, Podfic Available, Post-Book 5: Thick as Thieves (Queen's Thief)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-28
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:14:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22930816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theseourbodies/pseuds/theseourbodies
Summary: They sit in silence, then, a man and his wife, a woman and her husband. Two monarchs that had done terrible things, for love and despite it.
Relationships: Attolia | Irene/Eugenides
Comments: 12
Kudos: 44





	we will never be here again

**Author's Note:**

> Set before Kamet meets Attolia in the gardens.
> 
> smooches to [CisforCaffeinated](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CisforCaffeinated/pseuds/CisforCaffeinated), for the title
> 
> NOW WITH A [PODFIC](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24769279?show_comments=true&view_full_work=false#comment_315936865) BY THE INCREDIBLE @irrationalpie!!!!!! Thank you to irrationalpie for her incredible work and her care with this little fic ♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️

Deep in the marble palace of Attolia, behind the layers and layers of security provided by anterooms and guard rooms and sitting rooms, the King of Attolia paces like a caged animal outside his queen's bedchamber. The door to the golden-glowing room, never belonging to him but always his to enter and exit as he pleased or she did, was open between them. He made no sound as he moved, but he stayed always within her view from where she sat on her little gilded bench before her dressing table. If she was irritated by him or her attendants, all of whom were attempting to touch her in subtle ways through the process of getting her dressed, she didn't show it. Her capacity for care had not been changed by the grief and pain that had haunted her these past weeks, but she had always kept her patience like a deep well inside of her. As they fussed around her, she drew deep from that well, and allowed it. To be sitting upright was enough to please her; small pangs still haunted her body, deep down like ghosts of the agony that had wracked her for hours not long ago, and she was careful of angering those spirits. After weeks of bedrest, Irene wanted nothing more than to finally be free of that prison of pain that had scattered her thoughts and ruined her composure like nothing had ever managed before, but she had come this far; she wouldn't risk her recovery now, when she had finally begun to improve. 

In this way, Irene was a better patient than Eugenides would ever be, but he never had her education in stillness. His patience was like ash on a barren field-- quick to fly away and slow to settle again. But then, when a man could move so silently not even a ratcatcher could hunt him in the dark, she supposed that stillness had little use. As she looked at him through the reflection in her mirror, he scuffed a boot-- very deliberately, though the sound seemed like a simple mistake-- and Attolia gently turned to face him. Her attendants scattered like beautiful, graceful birds-- Phresine directed them away with a few small gestures when they would have hovered, and the whole lot of them migrated away to various perches in the antechamber immediately outside her bedroom or the attendant's quarters also attached to that room. Attolis came to his queen in their wake and, once all of them had left their monarchs in peace, Eugenides settled on the ground at her feet, cross-legged like some apprentice on a shop floor and not at all like the great king he had been recently named. 

"I have heard that your favorite guard has gone and stolen the right hand of Nahuseresh, my King," she tells him, her hand coming to sweep his hair back from his forehead hesitantly. His hair curls around her fingers like it and he want to keep her there. His head leans back with the gentle pressure of her hand, and he smiles up at her like she had wanted him to. Whatever else they had done to one another, Eugenides has always had a smile for her when she so wanted one. "You have your lynchpin at last." 

"So," he agrees, and the word settles heavy from his mouth. "I have tricked an honest man into stealing freedom for a man that did not want it, all to destroy the threat of an Empire when I would much rather have killed one single man in that empire with my bare hands, and called us square." He and she both look down at the hook resting in his lap. "Well," he says, embarrassed, and she leans down to press a kiss very gently to his forehead. They are beyond asking one another for forgiveness; all of this is theirs to bear and conquer. 

"And how is your soldier?" Irene asks when they are settled again. It has not escaped her notice that Eugenides has settled so that he is resting back against her without sitting on her feet; from there, he has a direct sight line to the windows and through the open door to the antechamber and the guard room beyond. 

"He has gone home to the Gede Valley; his sister has been married since he has been away." 

"He has gone? Or he has been sent?" 

Eugenides huffs dramatically, not looking at her. "I may have suggested it to him. Strongly." 

Irene strokes her hand through his hair again. She thinks she understands the subtle way his voice changes when he says it-- it is the nature of thieves to hide things that are precious to them, but it is the nature of kings to keep precious things close. 

Her husband presses subtly back against her legs and she thinks that perhaps it is not about natures after all; perhaps it is just about Eugenides of Eddis, trusting only one man to see him sitting in a chair looking for home on an empty horizon. 

"And will he return?" _To us_ , she thinks but cannot ask, _to you?_ _Or perhaps to Kamet?_ Irene finds that she is genuinely curious. Relius had told her of the state of her king's guard and his traveling companion when they had been brought aboard the galleys that had gone to collect them from the port. She remembered Nahuseresh's secretary as a golden-eyed boy, barely dipping his toes into adulthood. He had caught her interest as most beautiful, caged things usually caught her interest, and she remembered that he had not disappointed. He was a much better liar than his master, and Irene had made a subtle, secret game of catching him being honest. He had loved writing, she remembered suddenly. The look of intensity on his face when he was asked to write even the simplest notes or messages was the most honest thing she had ever seen from him. 

That that boy had been openly weeping at the revelation of his supposed betrayal of the man that had been sent to take him from everything he had ever known or known to want was testament enough to the journey that he and Costis had made together. As someone who had once been stolen herself, she wondered if their story was as finished as it had seemed to the onlookers. 

What Relius told his queen, he would have also told his king. Irene knows by the slump of Eugenides's shoulders that he has been asking the same silent questions. 

"He is loyal to the Guard. He is loyal to you," Eugenides tells her, turning to look back over his shoulder. "He'll return, and keep returning, until I release him."

She smiles at him gently and skates a soft finger along the scar along his cheek. 

"If he returns it will not be for the Guard's sake, and it will not be for mine," Irene says to her husband. "He is loyal, yes, and he will return in small part for that reason. But it is not the Guard he loves, and I can assure you that it is not me, my King." 

It is the nature of Eugenides's intelligence and cunning that Irene cannot often surprise him. Every time it happens, she tucks the feeling of warmth that blooms in her away, her own precious things kept close. Irene has always been a Queen, despite all that she has stolen. Eugenides stares up at her, mouth soft and face uncertain, and she can't help but laugh without malice. 

"You cannot tell me you did not realize, Husband. The whole palace has known since you stole him right out from under Teleus' nose and took the heart of the Guard on with him." She will not tell him what else the whole palace has known since then as well-- she remembers well what it is like to have to be _told_ that someone is in love with you. 

Eugenides's eyebrows furrow together and he turns away quickly to-- she leans down slowly to catch his face in profile before he can turn away from her with a huff-- pout at the ground. "He is loyal to me, but everyone knows how the Guard loves you," he says stubbornly. 

Irene very gently cuffs her husband. "And how they now love you, now that you are not tricking them into hating you." 

"Ouch," says her husband, killer of assassins and destroyer of imperial plots, pointedly. "Fine, I concede. I am much beloved by the Guard and by one guard in particular. But that does not change the fact that since I tricked him into punching me in the face and almost got him ignobly dead via roof tile and bar brawl, I have sent him into what could generously be called exile to steal a man that he did not know he was stealing! I have not yet forced the whole story out of him, but it seems that it is a good thing Costis has caught at least one god's attention; a man less skilled and less blessed might not have made it back here alive." Eugenides sighs, and says less stridently, "A less honest one would not have been able to make it back here alive and also perform his duty like he did." He leans his head back over her knees, to rest in her lap and look up at her. "And Costis is nothing if not an honest man, and a loyal one. It seems I have managed to do nothing to repay that honesty and loyalty-- that love, if he can still say that he loves me, still." 

It is the nature of rulers to keep precious things close to them, Irene thinks, even when they are ruinous in their clutching. She looks down at her king, her beautiful and bright thief, resting against her as if she has never done anything to hurt him. It is the nature of rulers to repay loyalty with pain and love with loss. It had been Relius' last lesson to her, taught to her unknowingly long after she had thought there was nothing more she needed to learn about this game of courts and kings. 

"You love me, still," Irene says softly. "Teleus and Relius would have died loving me. It is something that you can inspire in a person, but it is not so easily taken away as you would expect." 

They sit in silence, then, a man and his wife, a woman and her husband. Two monarchs that had done terrible things, for love and despite it. What Irene would never tell her husband, what she had realized much earlier, back when Costis had gone from a name and a face that had become familiar to her to another person on a very short list that had loved Eugenides for everything that he was, was that Costis Ormentides was the type of loyal that men wrote epics about. He would have marched into the mouth of hell if she had asked him to, without question; she also knew that he would slit his own throat for his king, if only Eugenides would only ask the right thing in the right way. He would be easy to lead into his own doom, and he would go without hesitation and only a little bit of unhappiness. 

But this same man had threatened treason against that same king that he loved so dearly; Relius had told her what her king's loyal servant had told the man that he had stolen across an empire and an ocean. The love of a man like that is harder won than his loyalty, and it seems that Kamet Kingnamer had won both of those things. As a queen of a king with very few allies as close as Costis, Attolia was wary of this news; as a woman who loved a man and cared for anyone who loved him like she did, Irene hoped that Kamet understood the gift he had been given, rather or not he asked for it or wanted it. 

“So, so, so,” says her husband softly, and they fall silent together. Her appointments now are minimal, and his have remained respectfully few. They sit comfortably together with one another without fear of missing much of the business of running a country, kept warm in the silence assured by walls of thick stone. 

**Author's Note:**

> I've just finished Thick as Thieves for the second time (and King of Attolia for the uhhhhhh several-th time) and I really just wanted to try my hand at some Irene and Gen. I've always loved the way MWT plays with titles and names, so I had a lot of fun playing with them here. 
> 
> I do hope you enjoyed! This fandom is small, but very inspiring <3
> 
> Title is a quote from the movie _Troy_ , often mis-attributed to Homer: 
> 
> _Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again._


End file.
